Toronto WebGL Community

This is the Toronto WebGL Community! Or at least the people we know that currently actively work on it… if there’s more of you out there, feel free to let yourself known and get involved by posting on the comments of this blog. I’ll make sure the right people see your stuff.

Anyway, this picture was taken at the Mozilla Toronto Offices. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with some of my co-workers talking to Benoit Jacob about the WebGL implementation within Minefield. We were doing some profiling and giving feedback on what changes could be made to provide better support for those using the WebGL API through Firefox/Minefield. So if any of you have suggestions, specifically more about how it’s implemented in Minefield and less about the actual WebGL standard, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to get the idea to them.

I, also, learned a couple of neat tricks. One such is a built in profiler in Linux that I could use on my desktop at work. It will make bottlenecks a lot easier to find. The command is perf record, which actually only came out to Ubuntu on a recent release.

We discussed other performance boosters, like TypedArrays. This is a new proposal to the Javascript language and will be somewhat monumental considering JS is a type-less language. This introduction will help improve WebGL code and will pave the way for the final release of WebGL. It just has to be approved by the standards committee.

Well, that specifically isn’t something Mozilla can implement on their own, as they’re just looking to implement what’s in the WebGL spec. Last I heard, Khronos gave the no to producing and standardizing WebGL extensions. I would say approach Khronos but it looks like you’ve already done that (as I found your question on the message boards). Best bet is to go to them (through the boards or the mailing list) and maybe if you get enough support they’ll follow through.

The WebGL spec does allow extensions, and there are plans to add standard extensions after WebGL 1.0 is finalized, and just yesterday on the public_webgl list there was a mention of the possibility of adding floating point textures as a standard extension: